Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  When his face was inches away from her, a dribble of blood sluiced from between his teeth.

  He pressed his face to hers, kissing her, his juicy tongue shooting into her mouth, past what little resistance her lips gave. Metallic liquid burned ulcers in her mouth. Her mouth filled with blood, Mattie saw: her daughter’s spirit standing before her, screaming in pain, screaming for release, screaming to give birth, screaming at her mother for giving her body up to this evil.

  Gil pulled back. His lips smacked.

  Mattie spat the blood he’d injected into her, spat it across his already stained face. He was momentarily blinded with blood. Dropped the knife, the coring knife, the one he’d used to help open her daughter up—his teeth alone had done most of the work, but he’d used the knife to rend her small body completely. He reached up to wipe his eyes.

  Knife clattering to floor. The Housekeeper cooing to the baby from the shadows. Mr. Big Man licking his fingers near the toilet. The tub with blood like a rose blooming from its basin. Gil wiping his eyes free from blood, his hands in tight fists. The fire consuming empty buildings in the alley. Knife still on floor. Dull from cutting through flesh and bone, dripping red.

  Slow. The memory was slow. But it was over in seconds. Over in seconds. What she’d done. What she’d done to her half brother.

  With the shred of thought she had left in her, Mattie grasped the knife in her left hand and with her right held her half brother back. Drove it into him just below his stomach. Sliced. Twisted. Gutted. Churned.

  Cored.

  She screamed as the Housekeeper tore her away. The dying man choking on his own blood.

  And then, nothing.

  Her mind gone.

  Her memory gone, except for knowing the Screaming House, except for love and fear of Nadine, her child, except for dread of Baron Samedi and the stink of the grave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE NEW LEAF

  1.

  Hugh got his résumé over to a headhunter’s office the week before the housewarming party. He’d been in particularly good spirits, and found the day-to-day work around the house occupied most of his time. But the résumé, it had to be done— just get me some job to fill in the time, some little white-collar pigeonhole where I can at least feel like I’m less of a house-husband. As much as he was enjoying working on the house, there were times when he thought if he didn’t get out of there he would go bonkers. He began coming up with any excuse just to go down the block, and when he did he felt clumsy—as if he’d been in the damn house so long, in leaving it he was entering an alien landscape, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, but always different.

  He’d notice people more on these brief excursions to the drugstore or to the hardware store, or more often than not to the liquor store ( but just beer, Scout, and only one a day sometimes, so I think I’ve got it under control); he’d notice how they were dressed, the anxiety in their faces, their small daily joys, their suppressed rage. That crazy bag lady who had given Rachel such a scare a while back, he saw her in the park and she screamed at him, something unintelligible—even she seemed to be a part of the fabric of daily life. It gave Hugh a sense that somehow just being alive was good. That perhaps this house, this home, would work out, after all. Whenever the small voice whispered in his head, Hugh Adair, you should be actively pursuing lawyerdom, instead of putting off the inevitable with carpentry and beer. Why did you go through those damn years of law school, anyway? he always had an answer: I think I went to law school to meet Rachel, I think it was some kind of destiny, I had to go through law school in order to find her.

  The week before Labor Day, he vowed to Rachel that he would turn over a new leaf.

  “And not just the leaf. Scout, the whole dang tree.” His spirits seemed so high that Rachel held back from mentioning what she thought ( I’m pregnant, Hugh, but maybe I’m not, but it would be okay if I were pregnant, right?)—again she would wait until she saw a doctor. She managed to postpone this in her mind—it was superstitious, but after all, the last time she was pregnant, she’d seen a doctor and then lost the baby. Why screw it up again?

  “So you don’t mind about this housewarming party idea.”

  “Nah. I just wish I had some friends to invite. I assume you’ll have your usual ‘This Is Your Life’ contingent. Miss Former Pep Squad Leader?”

  “Call Bufu up. He may be an asshole, but they’re good at parties, too. And you can call up all those other Lambda Chis. You were good enough friends with them in college.”

  “Yeah, so I can hear how successful my frat brothers are—no thank you. I wish I knew more losers like me.”

  When she’d left for work, Hugh made a few calls, the headhunting agency, the city bar association, even Bufu Thompson. “Yeah, a little party this weekend, just bring a friend or something, maybe a roll of toilet paper, hey, we can always use toilet paper…” He waded through his small black address book, and realized that most of the people in it were either potential business contacts or Rachel’s friends. He decided he’d better not use the phone much, hoping the employment agency would call back—it was times like these he wished he’d gone ahead and gotten call waiting on the phone, as obnoxious as he thought that service was.

  Bored, he strolled room to room, checking lights, checking the paint jobs he’d done, checking the scuff marks on the floors, checking for upended carpet tacks. He gobbled down a stale Hostess Donut that lay hidden in the breadbox, took out the garbage, checked for mail. Too hot to lounge out on the patio, and he didn’t need to get another sunburn this soon—that could wait for Labor Day. Ring you goddamn phone! Get me a job! Get me an interview! He straightened the cushions on the couch, and the photographs he’d taken in law school—mainly of Rachel on campus, or at the beach, or walking through the woods. He remembered where he’d left the Verena Standish book: in the turret room, and as he went into it that nonsensical word HOUNFOUR in streaked red on the cheap yellow paper. Should get someone in here and figure out how to tear down the wall so we can open up that small room there. Maybe just take the old sledge to it—if I could be sure there are no pipes or intricate wiring systems back there.

  Then he heard voices, coming from the area where he’d covered over the dumbwaiter.

  Penny Dreadful and her dreadful guests.

  A woman, not Mrs. Deerfield: “Well, I didn’t notice anything different about her. She seems common.”

  “Keep your voice down, dear, and she is quite special.”

  Another woman: “He opened her up to him, you saw her face that day. You know.”

  “As if that means anything, and that was weeks ago. I remember a time when he chose you, too, and see what’s come of it. And you weren’t terribly special.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Now don’t put those down the sink, I told you—“

  “You told me, you told me.”

  “Yes, well, I think you might listen for once. None of that for me, thank you, no.”

  “I know I’m impatient but I just wish it would happen sooner. Then we can all rest easier.”

  “It’s that divine justice thing he’s got going, he wants her because she’s a link to the past. It’s that debt. Sometimes we must move slowly to realize the dream of, well, so much more than just a lifetime.” She said this last word with obvious disgust,

  “No, too many calories for me, right now—ah, but the flesh is weak, so pass another one over, dear. Now, didn’t I just tell you not to put those down there. I’ll be forever cleaning them out…” A loud humming, a blender or some machine, cut off the voices; Hugh was almost disappointed.

  Hoping he’d hear something again from his downstairs radio show, he plopped down in the window seat, gave a cursory nod to the park—its trees were becoming a drained anemic green as the summer heat continued. He picked up Diaries of an Innocent Age, found the dog-eared page he’d left off on—the part where Verena started to sound a little loony tunes about Draper House.

>   The good part.

  2.

  From Diaries of an Innocent Age by Verena Standish:

  I had not looked into the background of the children’s governess as thoroughly as I might have, but she’d come with good recommendations from the Preston-Finches. So good, in fact, that Walter Preston-Finch called up to tell me that he attributed his son Aaron’s admission to Exeter directly to this woman’s instruction, and everyone in New York society knew Katherine Preston-Finch (later to become the wife of author-adventurer Francis Earhart) to be the very model of genteel comportment at the tender age of sixteen—our governess had everything to recommend her to the post. Only after the tragedy did I learn of Miss Fields’ relationship with Walter Preston-Finch and her subsequent nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. I would not have expected it in such a well-educated woman.

  I have felt, at times, betrayed by the Preston-Finch family, whose exaltation of this extremely unbalanced young woman contributed greatly to the destruction of my happiness in life. But I really blame myself, and not merely for hiring her without proper investigation of her past, but for casting a cold eye upon my own children, and, I daresay, for letting things within the house itself go unnoticed.

  Emmie was just four when we moved in, and James two and a half. Miss Fields was brought in immediately, and I suppose her preoccupation with the tarot cards should have alerted me to a susceptible mind. But I thought it all a lark, then, a gay pastime, similar to my own modest interest in table-rappings. And I was so very involved in being the Washington hostess, the dinners and the parties among the political cognoscenti, trying to help my dear Addison find his way through the diplomatic maze. When I remember those times I ache with regret—how it all means nothing to me now, how it was the folly of the times, how little I truly care for the eyes and ears of the world when I now think of all I lost in the bargain.

  But Miss Fields seemed such a serene presence. She was less than beautiful, always an advantage for a woman of no means and great intelligence, for she offended no employer’s wife (or so it seemed to me at the time). She did not seem to care a whit for men or their opinions, except inasmuch as they applied to Latin and Greek and the questions of classical philosophy. In dress and manner she was modest, shy and deferential when in the presence of her employers; yet on more than one occasion in those first few years, I can recall her chastising Addison for his attempts to sabotage the children’s early education with his outlandish stories. And I thought, at the time, well and good for her, to stand up to my husband’s periodic foolishness. There was something very Quakerish about her, a tendency to plainness in speech, dress, and habit. I thought her, those four years she was with us, a sober and stabilizing presence, one that would brook no nonsense, a woman who would build character in my blessed angels. I do not remember her face, except in those last moments, and then it was much changed. But she had an emptiness of expression and a rather remarkable way of reassuring whomever she encountered with that emptiness. These were purely social reassurances—I suppose deference is the better term. One always had the feeling that Miss Fields was more clever than her station, but she had a way of nodding and looking down to the floor that allowed one some superiority. She struck me, upon our first meeting, as someone who had no sense of herself. With the recent popularity of Dr. Freud, we might call this a crisis of personality or identity. But Draper House solved that for her, in an unspeakable way.

  She found, in the house, an identity, and perhaps even a husband, a lover—without that base connotation the word conjures in these pornographic times. A companion is perhaps a more suitable word—she found companionship in the house. But the house was, I believe, evil from its foundations to its roof, evil the way a guillotine is inherently evil, the way a hangman’s noose is evil, the way a snake is evil.

  What remained in Draper House, at any rate, was the irrational residue of evil—left perhaps by the original owner, a woman of murky reputation, or perhaps the evil grew like a fungus, from beneath the house, in the damp-encrusted walls, until finally, the entire structure was in the clutches of something beyond knowing. My religious beliefs are (and have always been) such that I allow there can be no flesh without spirit, however, there may exist spirit without flesh. And the natural law of spirit is to always seek out and invade flesh in order to carry out its benevolent, or in Miss Fields’ case, malevolent plan.

  When I finally was told the whole story of Miss Fields, how she had attempted to take her own life at the Preston-Finch home, suddenly I understood what this woman was looking for. Yes, on the surface, love, in particular a man to love her. How vile Walter Preston-Finch seems to me now! How he must have seduced this poor love-struck woman and then abandoned her to the fates. And how cruel the fates had been to her! What must it take to climb a staircase and tie a length of rope to the edge of a balcony and leap off to swing by your neck until dead! And how much more cruel it must have seemed to be rescued, to still live, when all hope for the future was gone.

  For, without knowing this story when Miss Fields first came to live with us, I couldn’t see it in her modest demeanor. How was I to know the heart that lurked beneath the skin? She came to us without a god, without a faith, with no hope, no sense of the judgment to come, no promise of heaven when the weary toil had ended.

  And in Draper House she found her god. Her savage god, a god of blood and torture and cannibalism. I do not mean to say a god exists beyond that which we call God; for this would be heresy. But as I have mentioned, there can be spirit, spirit without flesh, spirit seeking flesh, spirit hungry for flesh, hungry to corrupt and destroy flesh.

  And she found it in the crib, not James’ crib, but the crib beneath the house, the entrance to the back servant stairs leading to my dressing table. The hungry spirits touched her there, and through them she understood her mission.

  Was she insane? This is what we have been taught to believe. But who teaches us this? Yet more Godless people. We live in a Godless age, and so we look to our empty books and we see yet more emptiness. No answers, just words. We think as a race we possess genius simply because we affirm the unknowable: we say, there is nothing, nothing but ourselves in this world. And when we die, we become part of that nothing. How easy it is to believe in nothing, to believe in empty words, and empty worlds. So what does insanity mean to us? It is just another empty word for something we can’t understand, because we believe in nothing.

  Miss Fields was not insane.

  She was possessed.

  Miss Fields murdered my children in cold blood.

  But even cold-blooded murderers have their reasons.

  And I pray to God, every night I pray to God, that my children were dead before that woman began devouring them.

  We were gone, Addison and I, on our annual month in New York. It was cool at the Hudson River estate, and I would usually take the children and governess with us. Although it seems monstrous now that I left them while they were ill, I had, of late, become overwhelmed by other, more pressing matters.

  Addison and I were having our difficulties. We decided between the two of us to go up to the country without the children, at least for the first week, and try to decide what we would do. Contrary to the popular rumor of the time, divorce was never even considered. I had become a foolish and vain woman, I am afraid to admit, and had begun hearing voices in the house with my coterie of spiritualist advisers. We believed it haunted, although I now think that Draper House went beyond being merely haunted. It was a hunting ground, I think, a place of such hungry evil spirit that all forms of life were its prey. If my friend the Reverend Elijah Calhoun had told me that Hell itself bordered that house, it would not surprise me.

  And if you, dear reader, witnessed the scene I beheld in August of that year, you, too, would know the insatiable hunger of that place.

  We had been gone three weeks with neither a word from my children nor their governess. I grew worried. Addison contacted the authorities in Washington, but the delay was too m
uch. My husband and I exchanged words. In the heat of that argument, I left him, and journeyed alone to Washington. Indeed, I discovered that Miss Fields had spoken to the city police. She told them the children were taken to bed with a fever and that she had already sent word to me. In the carriage from the train station, I experienced a presentiment of what was to come: we passed an alley, stopping at a street corner, and I watched helplessly as a pack of hounds ran down a defenseless cat. Their jaws glistened with the feline’s blood as they tossed its flesh and yellow fur about. And there was something inside me that warned me from this, something that made me resist entering my own house at first.

  Draper House.

  I rushed upstairs, expecting the worst: that my children were deathly ill, and that Miss Fields was unaware of the danger their lives were in.

  But what I beheld was beyond imagining.

  I will not even write here the vile, unspeakable words she wrote across the walls with their blood, and I dare not remember too clearly my angels’ ravaged bodies. Skinned, and dressed the way a brutal hunter might two felled deer, hanging as if in a meatpacking house. She had tied them up on a crossbar of bamboo, and strung them along the shuttered window in my vanity.

  But Miss Fields herself, inspired with the spirit of the house, had even begun disemboweling herself. Later, although Addison tried to keep things from me, I learned that Miss Fields had choked to death on the fingers of her own left hand, which, at the moment they were thrust in the back of her throat, were no longer attached to her body.

  I dare not commit to paper the shock I felt. But I did not faint, I did not give in to frailty immediately. Instead, my mind took over, shutting itself down like a machine that has become too hot. This is the way in which the medical community has explained it to me.